Film choice

UNDERWORLD (2003)

Channel 4, 9.20pm

A shallow orgy of special effects that owes a clear debt to The Matrix in its techno-gothic style. When all-out war breaks out between vampires and werewolves, Kate Beckinsale’s leather-clad bloodsucker Selene must take on the armies of darkness. Bill Nighy lends a lone dash of class. (121min)

MultiChannel

THE FRESHMAN (1990)

ITV3, 10pm

Marlon Brando emerged from semi-retirement for this light comic treat, amusingly spoofing his role as Don Corleone in The Godfather. Brando plays a shady businessman who makes Matthew Broderick’s innocent student an offer he can’t refuse by involving him in an elaborate scam involving illegally imported endangered species. (102min)

NIGHT WATCH (2004)

Film4, 10.40pm

The first in a planned trilogy from the director Timur Bekmambetov, this Moscow-set vampire blockbuster broke box office records to become the most successful homegrown release in Russian history. Based on Sergei Lukyanenko’s bestselling fantasy novel about an uneasy truce between the armies of light and dark, Night Watch is full of impressive action but overstuffed with dense and confusing plot. (112min)

SUNDAY 26

GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)

Channel 4, 8pm

Originally conceived as a vehicle for the former Blues Brothers partners Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, this good-natured supernatural comedy about a team of spook- hunters became a huge box office smash. When Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982, Bill Murray took over his scene- stealing role. (107min)

ALI (2001)

Five, 9pm

Will Smith bulked up to 15 stone of lean muscle for the director Michael Mann’s screen biography of the boxing legend Muhammad Ali. Mann sticks to Ali’s most dramatic decade, from newly crowned champ in 1964 to comeback sensation in 1974. Smith never quite convinces in this overly reverential biopic, but it makes for engrossing social history. Ali’s Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman follows at midnight. (159min)

TOUGH GUYS (1986)

BBC One, 11.45pm

Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster enjoy mocking their own screen pasts in this fanciful action comedy. The two old-timers play veteran train robbers sprung from jail into a modern world they barely recognise. After a doomed bid to embrace old age, they dust down their zoot suits and get back into crime. Feelgood silliness rescued by the formidable charms of its iconic stars. (104min)

MultiChannel

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002)

BBC Three, 7.45pm

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the real-life teenage conman Frank Abagnale Jr in Steven Spielberg’s delightfully breezy comic caper. Travelling all over 1960s America, the suave fraudster passes himself off as a doctor, lawyer, airline pilot and secret agent. Meanwhile, Tom Hanks plays the dogged FBI man hard on Abnagale’s heels. (141min)

BAD SANTA (2003)

Sky Movies 1, 8pm (HD, 9pm)

This hilariously sour antidote to sickly yuletide sentiment stars Billy Bob Thornton as an alcoholic, sexually rapacious, foulmouthed safecracker who applies for a job as a shopping mall Santa. But his criminal plans are scuppered by a misfit kid (Brett Kelly) who stubbornly insists on believing in seasonal goodwill. Great stuff for cynics. (91min)

TIME AFTER TIME (1979)

Sky Cinema 1, 10pm

Cleverly combining the H. G. Wells classic The Time Machine with Jack the Ripper mythology, Time after Time is a pulpy but compelling thriller set in both Victorian London and modern-day San Francisco. David Warner stars as the Harley Street surgeon turned killer who escapes to the future, pursued by Malcolm McDowell as Wells himself. (112min)

MONDAY 27

Q & A (1990)

BBC One, 11.55pm

The veteran campaigning director Sidney Lumet put an energetic new spin on some of his familiar obsessions in this cynical thriller about shady deals and cronyism among New York’s racially divided police and city officials. Based on a novel by Edwin Torres, Manhattan’s first Puerto Rican assistant district attorney, Lumet’s pugnacious legal drama co-stars Armand Assante and Timothy Hutton.

But the main acting honours belong to Nick Nolte, who gained more than 3st (19kg) for his Shakespearean study in evil as a monstrously corrupt Irish-American detective. (137min)

MultiChannel

NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE (1978)

Film4, 9pm

Lowbrow college fraternity comedies would later become a Hollywood staple, but this slapstick riot was the first and one of the best. More tender and thoughtful than the genre it spawned, Animal House is a coming-of-age celebration of boozy excess and sexual anarchy at an American university in the early 1960s. John Belushi stars, with Tim Matheson, Kevin Bacon and Tom Hulce as his fellow students. Its director, John Landis, originally planned to shoot at the University of Missouri until the college president read the script and withdrew permission. The University of Oregon was used instead. (109min)

THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974)

ITV4, 11.50pm

A classic of the conspiracy genre, Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid thriller is an unsettling parable that tapped into America’s national unease about the Kennedy assassinations and the Watergate scandal.

Warren Beatty stars as a small-town news reporter investigating an unsolved political assassination and a mysterious spate of related deaths. Full of creeping menace, The Parallax View is sluggish in places, but builds to a chilling finale. (102min)

TUESDAY 28

A SIMPLE PLAN (1998)

BBC One, 11.25pm

The director Sam Raimi consulted his former collaborators the Coen brothers about shooting this wintry thriller in deep-frozen Minnesota. Based on Scott Smith’s bestseller, A Simple Plan stars Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton as small-town brothers who stumble across $4 million in the snow-covered wreck of a light plane. Their “simple plan” is to hide the money until spring,but then greed and family tensions take hold . . . Raimi plays down his usual comic-book humour in this fatalistic, finely acted neo-noir thriller. (123min)

MultiChannel

TRADING PLACES (1983)

Film4, 9pm

The Christmassy feelgood fable that helped to launch Eddie Murphy to stardom, Trading Paces puts a 1980s spin on the eternal debate about nature versus nurture. The director John Landis reunites with the Blues Brothers star Dan Aykroyd, this time playing an arrogant Philadelphia yuppie who is forced to swap his privileged life with Murphy’s homeless beggar to test a wager between his scheming corporate paymasters. Some of the jokes are a little strained, but the best scenes recall the sophisticated social comedies of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche steal the film as Aykroyd’s mean-minded bosses. (118min)

THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1976)

ITV4, 10.45pm

Arthur Penn’s ponderous western is notable for its unique screen pairing of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, but little else. The plot is rambling, while Brando’s cross-dressing gunslinger belongs in a different film from Nicholson’s horse-rustling gang leader. Brando’s decision to employ several different accents also looks like suicidal disregard for the whole project. In having his every whim pandered to, Brando’s madly self- indulgent performance killed his career. (126min)

WEDNESDAY 29

SCANDALOUS (1984)

Five, 1.40pm

An ill-conceived comedy thriller notable mainly for its big-name support cast, Scandalous was an early outing for Rob Cohen, who would later direct the action blockbusters The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Robert Hays plays an ambitious US reporter who uncovers a British spy scandal while under suspicion for the murder of his wife. John Gielgud, Pamela Stephenson and the Carry On veteran Jim Dale also appear.

A hackneyed Hollywood take on early 1980s London, there is little to enjoy here beyond nostalgic novelty value. (92min)

MultiChannel

LE DIVORCE (2003)

Film4, 6.45pm

One of the final collaborations between the long-term partners Ismael Merchant and James Ivory before Merchant’s death last year, this transatlantic literary farce is full of fine moments, but is ultimately an unwieldy mess. Kate Hudson leads the cast as a young American who becomes embroiled in the messy Parisian divorce proceedings of her stepsister, played by Naomi Watts. A mighty legal battle over a valuable painting follows while Glenn Close, Melvil Poupard, Matthew Modine and Stephen Fry hover in the background. (117min)

MY FAVOURITE YEAR (1982)

TCM, 7pm

This nostalgic comedy is a tour de force for Peter O’Toole, earning the sole Oscar nomination of his career so far in the role of a boozy, swashbuckling movie star, Alan Swann. Assigned to keep Swann out of trouble before his guest appearance on a TV variety show, Mark Linn- Baker’s young scriptwriter eventually bonds with the wayward star in funny and unexpected ways. A little too stagey and pleased with itself, Richard Benjamin’s warm-hearted romp was produced by Mel Brooks and inspired by his own youthful encounter with the Hollywood legend Errol Flynn. (92min)

THURSDAY 30

THE SEA HAWK (1940, b/w)

BBC Two, 1.10pm

Cashing in on his success in Captain Blood five years earlier, Errol Flynn again plays a roguish gentleman pirate in a vintage high-seas yarn from the Casablanca director Michael Curtiz. Brenda Marshall stands in for Flynn’s usual love interest, Olivia de Havilland. (109min)

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS (2002)

Channel 4, 10pm

Directed by the Scottish actor Peter Mullan, this hard-knuckled drama attacks the Irish Catholic church’s long history of incarcerating “fallen women” in prison-like Magdalene “laundries”. Geraldine McEwan plays the Mother Superior of one such institution, whose enslaved and exploited inmates include rape victims, unmarried mothers and teenage girls guilty of nothing more than flirting.

Co-starring Anne-Marie Duff, Mullan’s sustained howl of outrage is heavy- handed in places, but powerful enough to earn condemnation from Catholic bishops. The last Magdalene convent was closed only in themid-1990s. (119min)

MultiChannel

THE INSIDER (1999)/ GLADIATOR (2000)

ITV4, 9pm/Film4, 9pm

A tough choice for Russell Crowe fans, this simultaneous double bill features the pugilistic Australian superstar in two very different but equally impressive roles.

A triumph of spectacle over historical accuracy, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is a muscular reinvention of the swords-and-sandals blockbuster. Crowe earned an Academy Award for his butch turn as a mutinous warrior rebelling against his political paymasters in Ancient Rome.

Crowe was also Oscar nominated for his bloated, grey-haired transformation in The Insider, Michael Mann’s portrait of the real- life whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand and his courageous struggle to expose tobacco industry malpractice. (155 min/157min)

FRIDAY DECEMBER 1

BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (1967)

BBC Two, 1.30pm

The maverick British director Ken Russell brought his distinctive visual flair to the third in this classic trilogy of Michael Caine espionage yarns. Although less fondly regarded than its two predecessors, Billion Dollar Brain has improved with age, adding a psychedelic late 1960s sheen to Len Deighton’s chilly Cold War thriller about a planned liberation of the Soviet- occupied Baltic states by a crazed Texan billionaire and his private army.

Already tired of playing the scruffy spy Harry Palmer, Caine ducked out of his five-film contract after this memorably bizarre third instalment, but finally reprised the role in two feeble sequels almost 30 years later. (111min)

WYATT EARP (1994)

Five, 9pm

Revisiting a much-filmed slice of Old West history, Lawrence Kasdan’s thoughtful but ponderous biopic was distilled from a six-hour TV miniseries.It is beautifully filmed, but still overlong and lumbered with a deadly dull star performance by Kevin Costner as the legendary lawman. Thankfully Kasdan’s handsome western epic also features more compelling turns by an emaciated Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday, and by Gene Hackman as Earp’s stern father. (189min)

DAYS OF THUNDER (1990)

BBC One, 11.35pm

The wilfully moronic “high concept” blockbuster formula pioneered by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer and his late partner Don Simpson reached some kind of surreal nadir in this gloriously pointless star vehicle. Reuniting the Top Gun team in a revved-up thriller set in the macho world of car racing, Days of Thunder is chiefly noteworthy as the film that first brought together Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Cruise plays a hotshot race driver while the director Tony Scott fills out a virtually non-existent plot with loud, flashy, rubber- burning action. (108min)